Looking ahead

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Tried and tested
The main purpose of this article is to provide commonsense tips for developing your own e-learning development strategy. These ten design and delivery tips are offered as strategic rules to guide the building of your e-learning solutions. Moreover, they reflect the toolkit’s earlier concentration on the human dimensions of e-learning. These rules dispel the common axiom that, for all new employees, e-learning is but a mouse click away.

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What keeps your CEO awake at night?
I enjoyed chairing KCUK this year, and there were many good presentations, but the one that inspired me the most was a talk by Dr Bonnie Cheuk, global head of knowledge and information at Environmental Resources Management (ERM).
Bonnie’s talk was on ‘Supporting the business: Redesigning and improving your intranet’ but it wasn’t only the content that impressed me – it was her approach to knowledge management (KM), which is one that I have long advocated.

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Engaging training
When Ark Group’s conference producer asked me to deliver a presentation on ‘engaging your workforce in training’, I told her that it would take me about 30 seconds – if you want to engage your workforce in training, then make training engaging.

I’m not being flippant or facetious, but why should people be engaged in training? They have other things to worry about, their job to get on with and all those other things associated with work. Every day they receive countless e-mails, texts and voicemails demanding that things are done.

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Bringing health and safety to life
Web 2.0 technologies are opening up new possibilities to enable your health and safety programmes to come alive. By incorporating two-way communication tools and user-generated content on their intranet sites, organisations can give employees more ownership over such programmes. Web 2.0 can also help environmental health and safety (EHS) managers go beyond the notion that safety programmes are solely about checklists and procedures.

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KM in healthcare innovation
The stimulation of healthcare innovation has resulted from the reality that every organisation uses its own system of developing and performing initiatives. A lack of knowledge sharing caused an enormous overlap of subjects and types of initiative, therefore many innovations disappeared after the projects were finished, independent of their results.

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Book review: Implementing Enterprise 2.0: A Practical Guide To Creating Business Value Inside Organizations With Web Technologies
Enterprise 2.0’ was the term coined in 2006, by Harvard Business School’s Andrew McAfee, to describe the use of consumer web-based tools such as blogs, wikis, RSS and social networking, inside organisations. The term has been used to refer both to the technologies themselves and the new organisational forms and activities that they are claimed to enable.

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Overcoming challenges
Keeping up with the pace of technology evolution is a challenge in itself. Not only are the tools different to previous generations of communication and collaboration technology, they are inherently disruptive, and often challenge traditional organisational communication and work processes. Concerns surrounding security, time wasting and reputation management have led some firms to block employee access to online public networks. In other instances, lawyers feel they simply do not have enough time to find out how to use the tools for their work, or are apprehensive that use of networking sites may be a breach of ethics.